vMA – what is it?

VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) is appliance based on Linux system which can be used as centralized management point in VMware environment. It has several tools used in VMware environment like: vCLI, resxtop, vifs or vmware-cmd. vMA after initial configuration is quite handy if you manage several hosts.

Provide name for your vMA and select desired place for it in you infrastructure.

Select desired storage placement.

Select network setup.

Click finish and wait for ovf deployment.

Summary of appliance after deployment.

vMA – configuration

After we successfully deployed vMA we need to power it on and configure it.

Hit 6 and set IP address and netmask.

Hit 2 and enter default gateway according to your network setup.

Hit 4 and provideDNS server.

Hit 3 and enter desired hostname.

Hit 1 to end configuration. Now we need to enter new password for default vMA user vi-admin.

After password change vMA will be configured and you will see following screen in console.

You can login using browser https://vMA_IP_ADDRESS:5480 where you can configure if needed vMA. You can check for updates, set time zone, or reboot vMA.

vMA – usage

As vMA acronym says – vSphere Management Assistant, we installed it to manage ESXi hosts. Before we start executing command from vMA we need to add remote host. In order to do it we use following command.

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